EXAM$^2$ is a new benchmark for audio understanding that covers six languages and multiple modalities—speech, sound, music, mixed-audio, and visual images—providing 5,667 multiple-choice questions, 22,614 image instances, and 135,684 multilingual translations. It evaluates large audio language models (LALMs) and multimodal large language models (LLMs), revealing significant gaps in multilingual and cross‑modal performance. The authors also introduce Gemma3n-EXAM$^2$, a lightweight fusion model that improves multilingual results by up to 12.4% and multimodal results by 21.7% over a strong baseline.
By Jiawen Wang, Xiaoxue Gao, Zi Haur Pang, Nancy F. Chen
TimeBlind is a diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate fine‑grained spatio‑temporal compositionality in video large language models (LLMs). It categorizes temporal understanding into three levels—atomic event recognition, event property characterization, and reasoning about event interdependencies—and uses a minimal‑pairs paradigm where video pairs share identical static content but differ only in temporal structure. Across 20 state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs tested on 600 curated instances, the best model achieved only 48.2% instance accuracy, far below human performance of 98.2%, highlighting a reliance on static visual shortcuts rather than true temporal reasoning.
By Baiqi Li, Kangyi Zhao, Ce Zhang, Chancharik Mitra, Jean de Dieu Nyandwi, Gedas Bertasius
AgentVidBench is a new multi‑hop video question‑answering benchmark designed to evaluate spatial, temporal, and causal reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Unlike existing tests that focus on simple scene queries or global summaries, AgentVidBench includes step‑by‑step solution traces to assess whether agents gather the necessary evidence to justify their answers. Experiments with 12 MLLMs show limited single‑turn performance, but integrating these models into agentic workflows improves both accuracy and trajectory scores, establishing AgentVidBench as a comprehensive testbed for future research on agentic video understanding.
By Seoyeon An, Hyeonseo Jang, Minsu Kim, Chanho Lee, Younghan Park, Kangwook Lee
arXiv:2605.07593v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Real-world audio-visual understanding requires chaining evidence that is sparse, temporally dispersed, and split across the visual and auditory str...
By Hengyi Feng, Hao Liang, Mingrui Chen, Bohan Zeng, Meiyi Qiang, Zhengyang Zhao, Zimo Meng, Zeang Sheng, Wentao Zhang
Multimodal Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive video understanding, yet their ability to reason over long-form narratives is often masked by visual-centric evaluations and inefficient c...
Video-HolmesV2 is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on their ability to reason with spatio‑temporal audio‑visual evidence in long videos. It requires models to justify answers with precise evidence, uses a multi‑model cross‑verification pipeline and a spatio‑temporal evidence‑aware metric, and introduces an audio‑text guided token compression framework to reduce long‑context noise. In evaluations, even strong proprietary models score below 60% while the proposed approach outperforms comparable open‑source omni‑models.
By Zhaoyang Wei, Zipeng Wang, Yushe Cao, Chenhui Qiang, Shuaibing Cheng, Xuesong Yang, Sen Nie, Bowen Jiang, Wenchao Ding, Yanchao Hao, Zheng Wei, Xuehui Yu, Zhenjun Han
OmniHallu is a unified framework for detecting hallucinations in multimodal large language models across both comprehension and generation tasks involving image, video, and audio modalities. It introduces OmniHallu-Bench, a 10,000-sample benchmark with claim-level human annotations for six cross-modal tasks (I2T, V2T, A2T, T2I, T2V, T2A). The system uses a multi‑agent architecture that decomposes outputs into atomic claims, verifies them with modality‑specific experts, and aggregates evidence through structured reasoning, while a preference‑optimized verifier reduces expert calls by 66% with minimal performance loss.
By Jianjiang Yang, Peihang Li, Shanqing Xu, Mengchen Qian, Lu Zhang, Meng Luo
Audio Description (AD) provides spoken narration of visual events during dialogue gaps, making movies accessible to visually impaired audiences. The problem requires determining both what (which visua...
arXiv:2607. 10299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale multimodal models have drivenremarkable progress in vision-language tasks; however, comprehensiveomni-modal understanding remains under-explored, largely due to thescarcity of datasets with rich, explicitly aligned auditory cues.
By Kaiying Yan, Luoyi Sun, Xiao Zhou, Weidi Xie
STRAND is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models’ ability to track objects, their states, and relationships over time in videos. It evaluates intermediate reasoning by breaking queries into sub‑questions and uses Faithful Accuracy to ensure all parts of an answer are correct. The authors also propose an object‑centric framework that builds structured trajectories and shows reduced hallucinations and better temporal consistency compared to existing models.
By Thong Nguyen, Tri Cao, Khoi Le, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Quynh Vo, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Hooi Kuen-Yew
arXiv:2606. 07433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios.
By Jiahao Meng, Yue Tan, Qi Xu, Kuan Gao, Weisong Liu, Yanwei Li, Jason Li, Lingdong Kong, Haochen Wang, Qianyu Zhou, Jiangning Zhang, Guangliang Cheng, Yunhai Tong, Lu Qi, Minghsuan Yang
arXiv:2608. 09435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding dynamic sound sources requires jointly determining what produces a sound, where the source is located, and how it moves over time.
By Zhi Zeng, Cheng Zhang, Zesheng Yang, Rendong Pi, Jiaying Wu, Di Zhang, Zihan Ma, Guodong Li, Zhou Yang, Yu Xiang, Yifei Zheng, Minnan Luo